Thousands of people set up lasting powers of attorney (LPA) each year to protect their interests in case they lose mental capacity later in life. LPAs work by enabling you to appoint someone you trust to be your deputy and make decisions on your behalf should you ever lose the ability to manage your affairs.
A brother and sister have been removed as executors of their mother’s will because they could not work together and no longer trusted each other. The two siblings had been appointed as executors by their mother and were the main beneficiaries of her will. The brother lived in the same street where his mother had
A hospital consultant who refused to pay any maintenance or child support has been ordered to hand over his entire fortune to his ex-wife. The case involved consultant anaesthetist Essam Aly and his ex-wife Enas. The couple married in 2002 and had a son and a daughter. They divorced in 2011. Mr Aly then moved
The government is introducing a series of measures to boost housebuilding so more young people can own their own home. The key measures include building discounted homes for first time buyers on all “reasonable-sized” developments, unlocking public land for hundreds of thousands of new homes and supporting small building firms with planning changes. Prime Minister
A mother has been told that she can only have indirect contact with her children and cannot apply to change that decision for another four years. The Court of Appeal said the children had been subjected to too much conflict between their parents and needed to be protected from further, unnecessary stress. The case involved
On 8 July 2015, Chancellor George Osborne announced a long awaited increase in the inheritance tax nil rate threshold which will come into effect in April 2017. Whilst this is welcome news are the changes as good as they appear? Will they benefit everyone? And is the threshold really going to be £1 million? The
An employee who was sacked over a risqué photo that he posted on Facebook has won his claim of unfair dismissal. The case involved 31-year-old Faisal Auld who had worked for the company Norbert Dentressangle for 10 years. In 2009 he had posted a photo of himself holding a work colleague in a headlock in
The time that workers who don’t have a fixed workplace spend travelling from home to their first job of the day counts as work time, according to the European Union’s Advocate General. The same principle applies to the time spent travelling back home after the last job of the day. The issue arose out of
A husband and wife have won the right to inherit a share in a house after a court corrected an error made in a will. The case involved the will of a man who had owned a house with his sister-in-law. They had been tenants in common. The will was amended three times between 2005
A beauty queen has been awarded a £3.3m settlement in a divorce case described as “bruising and unedifying” by a leading judge in the High Court. The case involved Russian beauty queen Ekaterina Parfenova and her former husband Richard Fields, an American lawyer. The couple met in 2001 and have two children. They have lived